No Lack of Warnings of American Fascism Yet Here We Are!

” They didn’t call it fascism. They painted it red, white, and blue, and called it Americanism.” That’s from a 1942 movie with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy called Keeper of the Flame, which imagines a full fledged homegrown American fascist movement. Throughout American literature and films of the 20th century, there was plenty of warning of Trumpism. The orange one himself likens himself to Citizen Kane. As you listen to this podcast, the many parallels are shocking. Fiction becomes “documentary realism.” Professor Sarah Churchwell, chair of the University of London’s Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, runs through the explicit and prescient warnings we apparently ignored. But some hope of resistance is also in those books and movies.